Performance of vSphere Flash Read Cache in VMware vSphere 5.5
Aug 26, 2013
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) is a feature in vSphere 5.5 that utilizes the vSphere Flash Infrastructure layer to provide a host-level caching functionality for virtual machine I/Os using flash storage. The goal of introducing the vFRC feature is to enhance performance of certain I/O workloads that exhibit characteristics suitable for caching. In this paper, we first present an overview of the vFRC architecture, detailing the workflow in the read and write I/O path. We then show some of the workloads that perform better vFRC through detailed test results. We conclude the paper with performance best practices guidelines when using vSphere Flash Read Cache.